Column: Why is teaching not staffed by top grads?

We need lots and lots of turnover, retirements and, yes, firings.

Public school teachers and their supporters march in Chicago on Thursday. (Photo: Sitthixay Ditthavong, AP)

Story Highlights

Upgrade the quality of the nation's teaching force.

Remove some of the blue-collar stigma to teaching.

Countries with best education systems recruit top graduates.

If and when students in Chicago are headed back to school, parents, teachers, worried politicians and union leaders shouldn't be smiling.

The fight to dramatically upgrade the quality of the nation's teaching force has just begun. Years from now, the Chicago strike most likely will be viewed as a canary-in-the-coal-mine incident.

The awkward fact is that teaching in America has become a quasi blue-collar profession mostly shunned by top college graduates. Look around the world. The countries with the best education systems recruit from top graduates. Whether they belong to unions makes little difference.

Here's the question that never gets asked: What happens to the 43,000 top graduates who wanted to teach but didn't get an offer from TFA? Nearly all seek other careers.

For the best and brightest college graduates in this country, jobs offered by regular school districts (unlike TFA jobs) lack prestige. Their accountability-free practices give the best teachers no way to stand out. These young TFA applicants rose to the top of their high schools classes and won admittance to the top tier colleges. They want a shot at shining on the job as well.

When I started researching a book about Michelle Rhee's time as superintendent of the schools in Washington, D.C., I found a system that viewed itself as kind of a Department of Public Works that happened to involve schools. At the central office, many workers barely had an idea what their jobs entailed and nobody ever got fired. What happened to workers so grossly incompetent that the central office couldn't tolerate them? They got sent to the schools.

At the school level, teachers blamed poverty entirely for the dismal outcomes of their students — an excuse that didn't hold up when Washington students were compared with similar high-poverty students in other cities faring far better. That attitude wasn't universal, but it was prevalent enough to inflict serious damage.

So how can the U.S. steer its education system in a new direction?

Understanding the solution requires revisiting the two biggest reasons we got into this mess. The first reason, at least on the surface, is positive. Over the past several decades, the best-and-brightest American women found themselves presented with a smorgasbord of great jobs that in earlier times went only to men. No longer did these women have to choose teaching. Good for businesses, law firms and doctors offices; bad for schools.

The second reason is the breathtaking incompetence seen in school governance. State legislators, school boards and superintendents allowed unions to negotiate work rules that guaranteed teachers could advance in pay and enjoy bullet-proof job protection regardless of their competence. Don't blame the unions here; they were just carving out the best deal for their members. Who dreamed they could nail down those kinds of sweetheart deals?

Just as culpable are school district personnel departments that rarely bother to look beyond the local teachers colleges that for years have served as reliable feeders but rarely attract top candidates. Even bigger offenders are superintendents in right-to-work states who willingly embrace the work rules negotiated in the union-friendly states, such as seniority privileges not connected to teaching ability. Simply out of laziness, a desire to duck conflict, or both.

The question becomes: What would it take to lure some of those TFA applicants, and a lot more like them, into regular public school districts? It starts with removing some of the blue-collar stigma by tying pay and advancement to actual classroom performance. Do a great job, get great rewards. Exactly the kind of system the Chicago union was resisting.

The high-performing charter schools have demonstrated that plenty of top college graduates want to teach as long as they are part of a team designed to succeed. It can happen in a place like Chicago Public Schools.

But don't expect any of this to happen quickly. Lots and lots of turnover, retirements and, yes, firings have to take place. And lots of lots of bright motivated recruits from the nation's best colleges and universities, along with thousands of talented mid-career changers, have to take their place.

Not easy, but possible. If Finland and South Korea can design systems like that, so can we.

Richard Whitmire is author of The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation's Worst School District and co-author of The Achievable Dream: College Board Lessons on Creating Great Schools.